It's a really rough draft on what I want, but you can get the idea. Performance is the biggest problem, but even performance aside I'm wasting CPU/GPU time rendering/computing particles that are behind my UIImageView (the demonic rune looking thing).

Does anyone have any idea how to emit particles along a path or a better way to get a glowing animation behind a view? Here's a snippet of my emitter view that set's up the animation: